University of Leeds

we can not see the social relation in Wi-Fi networks, so we depict invisible relations by converting wi-fi ap into colours. It is like metaphor while we understand some intangible concepts and relationships via tangible things. it is art and nothing can replace artwork. inspired by alain badiou

In Alain Badiou’s lecture “Speaking the Unspeakable”, he said “the goal of Monet is to directly inscribe on the artificial surface of the painting the light and colours as the process of division of light. But light and its division does not exist at the surface of water … So Monet has to force the painting to express the inexistent, the inexistent which is not things in light, but light as a thing … and finally when we see the painting we understand that it’s not really light as a thing, it’s the impossibility of something like that. But this failure is the victory of painting. This failure is the glory of painting as such”(http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/38/76).

I can’t understand his opinion well. Did he want to express painting has its unchangeable features so painting own its special position in art?

“From Anthropology to Art – The Document Exhibition of Jung-Hua Liu’s Wi-Fi Cyborg Art Project”
Jung-Hua Liu was an anthropologist and his study concerned about travel, material culture and identity.He explored these issues with the fieldwork on international marriage, divine figures and aboriginal house.These fieldworks deepen and strengthen his ability to analysis the relationship behind complicated social phenomena.Now he leaves the tribes and folklore, he is an artist to link the issues via his global urban Wi-Fi fieldwork.In this document exhibition, he will present how he converts anthropological studies into artworks.Through this exhibition, the audience will understand how artists can adopt interdisciplinary research to create their unique art language to expand the form and content of art.

In 2010, I have my exhibition “Urban Wi-Fi Landscape” in Taipei metro “Jianzicui” station. This exhibition displayed 40 urban Wi-Fi landscape prints in London, Chicago, New York, Hong Kong and Taipei.

Around 2005, lots of cities in the world began to implement their municipal Wi-Fi infrastructures and commercial hotspots. In the meantime, Wi-Fi APs (access points) replace traditional wire/ADSL modems in personal houses and public places in metropolis gradually. Wi-Fi is not only innovative technical products but also global phenomena in the first decade of 21 century. This fast-developing and popular urban infrastructures and services attract to me and I want to represent invisible and independent Wi-Fi networks via visual and colourful way mark its multiple attributes, such as material/immaterial, invisible/visible, local/global, private/public, and routes/roots.

I have collected Wi-Fi data in Taipei since 2006 and went to London, Chicago, New York, Hong Kong until 2010. I translated unique Wi-Fi’s hardware BSSID (Basic Service Set IDentifier) number into web colour code and sorted the order according to my routes. BSSID is 12-digit code and it consists of two part of numbers. The first 6-digit code is manufacturer’s code and the last 6-digit one is serial number in manufacturer’s factory.

I am creating a cyborg landscape portraits. The fieldwork offers me a physical routes and html colour is the root of this landscape. I didn’t create cyber art in cyberspace. Actually, I created artworks in traditional landscape portrait way but the landscape is composed of wi-fi ap distribution data, ap BSSID and paint material from web.